Sunday, July 07, 2013

Chus Pato, HoRDES OF WRitINg, trans. Erín Moure

To bring Chus Pato’s words into English, the translator
must travel at breakneck speed, trying not to trip over tree roots and go
flying. I still end up with skinned knees. Pato topples all lyric convention,
and in a rush of grammatical and visual leaps, brings us face to face (kiss or
collide!) with the traumas and migrations of Western Europe, with writing
itself, and the possibility (or not) of poetry accounting for our animal
selves: our selves who will die.

The
urgency of her task is such that Pato wriggles out of any known form of the
poem, and out of the confines of the book. The poems translated here are those
of Hordes of Writing, the third
volume of her projected pentalogy Method,
in which she refashions the way we think of the possibilities of poetic text,
of words, bodies, political and literary space, and of the construction of
ourselves as individual, community, nation, world. (Erín Moure,
“Animality and Language”)

The
third book in Galician poet Chus Pato’s projected pentalogy, Method, is Hordes of Writing (BuschekBooks,
Ottawa ON/Shearsman Books, Exeter UK, 2011), a collection that follows m-Talá (2009) and Charenton(2007), all of which has been translated from the Galician
by Montreal poet and translator Erín Moure, and co-published by
England’s Shearsman Books and Canada’s BuschekBooks. Through Canadian
translators and champions such as Moure, Angela Carr, Bronwyn Haslam, Oana Avasilichioaei, and Robert Majzels, there has been a growing resurgence in
Canadian writing over the past decade of poetry translated into English.
Constructed in three sections, Hordes of
Writing exists as a kind of collage of single lines and sections of prose,
constructing a world directly out of sentences. There are elements of the book
that read as a journal, or fragmented novel, composing scenes as easily as
concepts. Pato’s is a narrative that doesn’t so much travel as simply reappear
at different points from section to section, allowing the reader instead to
attempt to bridge that distance. As she writes: “I trace a meridian: north and
south / it’s me (arms held at my sides). My horizontal abscissa is a starry /
equator[.]” Pato’s writing (via Moure) is entirely physical, and this is a book
that is extremely difficult to pigeonhole—joyously so—writing fragments,
journal entries, prose poems and other blended components. What is a poem? What
is a poet? As Pato writes: “This—she concluded—is the status or territory of a
poet // poet is any human whatsoever.” There is much anyone interested in
writing could learn from this book.

It hits her right in
mid-crosswalk, after deciding to walk from bus stop to hotel, she realizes
she’s too laden with baggage; and when she showers, the water gives her lovely
curls and after getting ready for a first meeting she told herself that not
only was she all primped and glowing but she’s far more stunning now than in
her youth and soon she walks the sidewalk as if she never, never daydreams and she
realizes how much she’d like it if she were with Antón Lopo right now that she
is the happiest protagonist of a novel on earth and she doesn’t think at all of
nausea

—and then?

—Marta and Publio arrived but
Marcelo had to go defend the Austro-Hungarian border